Switching off iMac screen

Sat, 27 January 2007

Checking my site statistics, I’ve noticed there are quite a few hits from search engines querying ‘switch off iMac screen‘ or ‘turning off iMac display‘ . The iMac owners would like to be able to switch off their screen while the computer remains on, keeping the open processes running, such as video encoding, P2P traffic, iTunes playing …

Can it be done? Unfortunately - no. The display is integral part of the computer and has no power switch to it.

I have spent numerous hours searching through forums, discussion groups, Apple help, blogs, Australian federal parliament archives (OK, just kidding on that one), but there is no real solution to this problem.

I have also tried to figure out if there is any key combination to do this, and checked dozens of keyboard shortcut lists, but nothing there too. I even tried the craziest possible key combinations on my Mac, such as Ctrl-Opt-Cmnd-Esc, Shift-Ctrl-Opt-Eject, even Ctrl-Opt-Cmnd-Eject, but nothing helped. The last one was promising, though, the screen went off and I thought “Wow, this is it “, just to realise that this key combination shuts down your computer with no questions asked.

The only remaining thing you can do is to use the Energy Saver in System Preferences. While this requires a bit of work every time you want to turn off your screen, it is your last option to keep those programs running while you and your computer screen sleep.

Open System Preferences and select Energy Saver. Click on Sleep tab and you will see two sliders.

Set the top one (Put the computer to sleep when it is inactive for: ) to desired value, or set to ‘Never’ if you expect the program to run for more than three hours.

Set the bottom one (Put the display to sleep when the computer is inactive for: ) to 1 minute. Walk away and your display will go to the fairyland in 60 seconds.

I would suggest to leave the System Preferences window open, so you don’t forget to set it back to normal values, once you wake up your display.

You can speed up this process somewhat if you use NightyNight, a script that does what I have just described.

Run the script to toggle between ‘one-minute-sleep’ and your standard settings. NightyNight will quit as soon as it has changed the display sleep settings.

Download NightyNight from MildMannered Industries web site.

Meanwhile, let’s hope Apple will do something about it in Leopard.

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Posted in Hardware, Mac